6 Ideas That Define Design in 2014

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The above-ground portion of an underground handball court designed by Bjarke Ingels. Read more to find out the story behind the swelling form. 

It’s clear we’re in a design renaissance unheralded since Mid-Century Modern in the 1950s.
And some of the same broad factors that drove that flowering of design genius are driving the current age.
In the 1950s, design boomed because it had so many new technologies to reckon with: Mass manufacturing, new factory techniques, plywood molding, and the expanding reach of television, which allowed stars like Charles and Ray Eames to reach millions, extolling a new and better world, fostered one chair at a time. Those designers flourished amidst a surplus of technology, ripe for new applications.
Today, we have cheap silicon, sophisticated sensors, and software that provides limitless avenues of expression. Once again, designers are taking advantage of the narrowing gap between what can be imagined and what can be made. Design, after all, is what allows us to make sense of the technology surrounding us. In an age of commoditized hardware and countless apps, design is among the few ways to make something—from a website to a product to the experience of flying across the country—stand out. Let’s call this new renaissance Silicon Modern.
We already have an inkling of what technology will become fodder for designers: Our devices are using more and more data mining and AI to anticipate what we want or need before we even ask for it. This is a fascinating challenge for UX designers. They must increasingly grapple with how to take technology out of our lives by creating, for example, context-aware apps that require less input from us.

Dinner atmosphere at WIRED by Design. Lester Cohen/Getty

We gathered hundreds of influential designers last week for our inaugural design conference, WIRED by Design. They ran the gamut from people who don’t consider themselves designers at all to people who think about design with every breath they take—from a designer at Google X, the company’s secretive research lab, to the lauded director Jeff Nichols, to rock star designer Yves Behar (of course). So what matters in design? What’s next? Answering that requires understanding six core values of those who are leading the renaissance.

1. Embrace Constraint, Then Expose It

Design depends largely on constraints, a point Charles Eames made decades ago but remains relevant today. Architect Bjarke Ingels, for example, laid out his own design philosophy, one that rests not simply on embracing a constraint, but exposing it.

Below ground, the handball court’s ceiling is shaped by formulas describing the natural arcs of thrown balls. courtesy Bjarke Ingels

The work of Ingels’ firm, BIG, exemplifies that ideal. Faced, for example, with designing an underground handball court for a high school, the firm realized the ceiling was too low to accommodate the arc of a handball’s flight. The architects decided to use ballistic calculations to determine the range of typical paths a ball might follow, resulting in a ceiling that rises like a sine wave. That of course means it pokes above ground, like a hill. This too became a virtue. The man-made hill creates a natural gathering spot akin to a grassy hillock in a park. It’s become a center of social life on the campus. By embracing a constraint and running with it, BIG created a piece of architecture that was more than the solution to the problem it was intended to solve.
This idea was echoed by Ian Bogost, the noted technology writer and game designer. He noted that fun, at its essence, isn’t freedom from constraint, but the complete acceptance of it. Games, he said, become fun only when we burrow into the constraints placed upon their worlds. That is, they’re fun only when the constraint consumes us, and insinuates us in a world unlike our own.

A very serious looking slide from Bogost’s inspired talk. courtesy Ian Bogost

The point is, most designers try to hide the constraints they’ve been given, but the best designers turn constraints into a coat of arms. They flaunt them and turn them over endlessly, seeking new routes for expressiveness and delight.

2. Expose New Problems

Ije Nwokorie, who grew up in Nigeria, sits at the top of the design world as the new CEO of Wolff Olins. The firm is known for helping re-brand Windows and USA Today, among many other things. His roots lend him a visceral connection to the malaria epidemic wracking Africa, but unlike many who aspire to do good, he does not believe free-flowing foreign aid is the answer. Instead, he argues for a for-profit model of development. At WxD, he announced the inauguration of Code-M, a non-profit that aims to create products so irresistible they spark consumer demand in both the developing world and the first world.

The branding system of Code-M is a scalable mark that plays on the motif of a mosquito net. courtesy Ije Nwokorie

Code-M isn’t a product line yet. Rather, Nwokorie and Wolff Olins are launching a series of workshops in which creative thinkers are asked to create products that can provide invaluable services in the developing world while becoming viable commercial products everywhere else. One of the first products designed with that in mind is Little Sun, a solar-powered LED lamp designed by artist Olafur Elliason. It is sold in design shops in the US and Europe, subsidizing its distribution in Africa. Along a similar vein, Nwokorie’s partners are trying to reinvent the malaria net.
It’s an exciting idea and a promising model, but one fraught with challenges. The economics of consumer products are brutal, and passing any meaningful revenue on to worthy causes abroad is difficult. To be effective, a product like the Little Sun would have to be a huge success. But Nwokorie is on to an important idea: By reframing how designers view the problems they’re trying to solve, they may see far greater impact than they imagine.

Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans of YACHT performing on stage, after describing the process that went into designing the CD for their single Where Does This Disco? Lester Cohen/Getty

3. Products Without Edges

It figures that perhaps the brainiest talk at WIRED by Design came from a pop group. In this case, YACHT dance-pop outlet that hails from Brooklyn Los Angeles. (Their name is actually an acronym for Young Americans Challenging High Technology.)
Claire Evans said fans consistently ask, “How does a song begin?” The answer, she confessed, isn’t terribly interesting. A song usually begins with a tossed-off idea that gathers tidbits as it develops, like a snowball rolling down a hill. The more interesting question, she said, is, “Where does a song end?” She cited the CD single “Where Does This Disco?”, a song that started as a pun on a CD disclaimer: Where does this disc go? That led her and her bandmate Jona Bechtolt to explore the legacy of CDs, which are disappearing rapidly without inspiring the nostalgia of vinyl records.
That led them to research the compact disc itself, which which yielded a surprising factoid: the information contained on a CD isn’t encoded in the reflective foil, but the plastic itself. The foil is there only to bounce the CD player’s laser beam back to its sensor so the information can be read. Knowing that, YACHT created a “CD” intended as a work of art: The single “Where Does This Disco?” is encoded with every song YACHT ever recorded…but it lacks a foil backing. Thus, t can never be played. Evans said the idea was to create the CD as a new kind of experience tied to the band’s own artistic sensibilities—rather than simply distributing more music.

The unreadable CD. courtesy Claire Evans

It’s a powerful idea: Here was a band that thought of their music not as a thing in itself, but the beginning of a chain of experiences which had no edge. That’s a worthwhile idea whether you’re designing phones or apps or cars or buildings.

4. Now More Than Ever, Design Is Psychology

Hardcore UX geeks know the discipline’s roots are in Human-Computer Interaction, a wonky discipline that arose in the 1980s from another discipline, cognitive psychology. That discipline was largely concerned with cataloging the foibles of human behavior that created disastrous human-machine interactions in the workplace. Think Three Mile Island, or the crash of any number of jetliners during the 1970s.
At WxD, it was striking to see two designers, Jake Barton and Michael Hendrix, reaching back toward psychology to find more fertile ground for design thinking.
Hendrix, a partner at IDEO, offered a novel idea: The values we attach to design are rooted in embodied cognition, a field pioneered by George Lakoff and furthered experimentally by Joh Bargh at Yale University. Embodied cognition stems from the insight that our bodies influence our understanding of ideas just as surely as words do. Bargh has found, for example, that people who sit in hard chairs during a negotiation are less likely to compromise, and people given  a heavy clipboard while interviewing job candidates take the task more seriously than those given lighter clipboards.

One Yale study showed that subjects holding warm cups judged people more warmly—in other words, a physical fact about cup shaped the subject’s emotional responses. Courtesy Michael Hendrix

That should be gobsmacking news for designers who have always relied on intuition and human observation to justify their design decisions. When they say “Oh, this should be rounded and friendly” or “That just feels cheap,” they’re referring not just to a set of values imposed upon them by other design-minded folks, but perhaps also reflecting deeper assumptions about features we expect from an object, given the values it’s supposed to represent.
Hendrix pointed out that many classic designs are rotten with precepts that seem lifted from a paper on embodied cognition. The doors of a BMW feel heavy, but they’re not actually heavier than those on other cars. Rather, the hinges have been tuned to offer greater resistance. That heavier feel helps impart a feeling of weightiness, importance, and value. The Apple store is filled with similar metaphors: High tables make you lean forward toward the devices, giving them the brunt of our attention and expectation. The ubiquitous glass lends a feeling of transparency, which in turn makes us aware of everything the store. It helps the whole place feel open, inviting, and user-friendly.
In the meantime, the designer Jake Barton recounted how he came into chance contact with a psychologist, who told him we’re more apt to remember experiences when they’re attached to an emotion. He suddenly realized his entire body of work was filled with strategies to take advantage of that psychological quirk. Barton’s firm, Local Projects, has done a wealth of work designing museum experiences that are meant to be memorable. To make them so, they tweak our emotional responses. For the Cleveland Museum of Art, for example, Local Projects created a video monitor that uses facial recognition to match any face you might make to a work of art in the archive. Flash your most fearsome grimace, and you might see a woodcut of a menacing Japanese samurai wearing a battle mask.
The point is, the design of an object itself only takes us so far. For the design discipline to advance, we must understand human motivations, mores, and biases with ever greater fidelity.

5. Manage for Tension

Celebrity chef David Chang managed to encapsulate the nub of design thinking into a talk that ostensibly was about how to invent dishes that leave you slack-jawed with delight. A good chef, he said, is one who can empathize with tastebuds other than his own, who can see past what he wants from a dish to see how others might react. This, you’ll notice, is the crux of so-called “Design Thinking” used at places such as Stanford’s d.School and IDEO, where they have long, drawn-out processes dedicated to forcing designers to observe users, rather than make assumptions about them.

David Chang, Chef and Founder of Momofuku. Lester Cohen/Getty

But, Chang pointed out, there are two enemies of invention, and both of them are silence. The first is the silence created in a kitchen ruled by a dominant boss who allows no viewpoint but his own. In that setting, the silence of submission sets in, burying others’ ideas. The second silence is one created in kitchens ruled by complete acceptance of every idea. When criticism isn’t honest, no one says anything for fear of hurting each other.
Chang said the best kitchen culture is one where people can go at each other, forcefully but fairly. Criticism flows constantly, but so does the desire to keep trying. How do you create such tension? By sticking with people, letting them fail, and letting them learn on their own, while guiding them to better places.

6. In Conclusion, Design’s Boundaries are Always in Flux

At WxD, we heard from “designers” whose media range from apps to appetizers. Is all of this design? Absolutely, and for a simple reason: Design, more than anything, is about being canny enough to find problems that remain unsolved— then solving them with as much insight into the human mind as you can possibly muster. Sometimes, that results in a novel artifact. Other times, the result is simply an orchestrated moment in time. The point is, if your aim is to understand what design is, then you’d better have a damn good eye for where it might appear.